


in another universe

by andchaos



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, canon AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 23:07:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4980172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchaos/pseuds/andchaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He tells her that he’s never believed in fate quite as strongly as he believes in her.</i>
</p>
<p>Ten universes where they make it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in another universe

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: there's references to gansey's canonical death-prediction, but he doesn't actually....die.

In another universe she is born curse-free and just as fiery and bright and rabid, and he loves her razor-sharp edges.

Blue is a mirror and Gansey wants to find Glendower, only she never saw him that night on the corpse road so when she looks across the floor of Nino’s and finds a table of raven boys all gathered around and laughing—one dark and cruel, one smudgy and pale, one fair and boyish, one stately and short—she momentarily wants to drive her fist through the hostess stand but she doesn’t feel any shock at all.

She smooths her apron and strides across to their table, and she barely notices the double-take that the boyish one does when she sweeps her hair off her cheek.

The boys order and Gansey goes last and he says, “I’ll have a Salisbury steak, well done, a side of fries, and your number, please,” and then he smirks and jerks his thumb across the table at the boyish one and adds, “for him.”

Blue doesn’t give him her number but Adam apologizes to her as they’re leaving and he comes in for a reading and she lets him take her out, lets him kiss her cheek, then later lets him kiss her hand, then later still she lets him kiss her lips. They don’t feel sparks but Adam’s sweet and Blue likes him and though they date for awhile, Blue isn’t too sad when they go to different colleges and he starts dating Ronan.

They meet up again during winter break one year, and she sees his stately friend that she hasn’t seen since high school, and after Adam and Ronan go to bed (the same bed) and Noah does too (a separate bed) she and Gansey stay up talking. When he brushes her hair from her cheek and tells her that she looks beautiful tinged pink from the cold, she tells him, “I know,” and they laugh and wrap themselves back up so he can walk her home in the snow.

He pauses at her front step. She looks up at him and wonders how he’s grown from a search-obsessed boy (they never found the king) to this focused, steady, handsome history buff who wants to change the world. When he ruffles the snow from her hair, she wraps his scarf around her fist and pulls him down towards her.

When they kiss, she doesn’t feel guilty at all.

 

*

 

In another universe her family runs a natural remedy and holistic healing shop called Fox Way, and Gansey comes in needing a cure for a friend’s mother.

He’s pale and wild when she looks up as the bell over the door rings, his hair mussed like from sleep and his eyes wide behind thin-rimmed glasses. Blue’s the only one working and she lifts her chin from her hand and straightens behind the register, asking what she can do.

“She won’t wake up,” is the first thing he says, and as Blue bends to rifle through their collection of remedies for waking, he rushes on, “and she’s been unconscious for two months and they think it’s shock from her husband’s death and she won’t wake up, she won’t wake up.”

Blue closes shop to calm him down and ends up walking him to his car, but he’s hyperventilating then between gasps about some boy named Ronan and how Gansey’s afraid of who his friend will become without his mother, so Blue drives him to his house and guides up the stairs and she spends the day with him and Ronan at Aurora’s hospital bedside. She goes through every remedy she knows and gets distracted with how Gansey paces by the door and then goes back to her healing, and Ronan watches her with eyes like steel with just the barest slimmer of hope beneath it.

Gansey wants to help so Blue lets him hold her hand while she works her brand of non-magic magic, and when Aurora’s heart monitor unsteadies Ronan calls for the nurses and when Aurora’s eyes flutter open Ronan hugs his mother, and when Blue finally tears her eyes away from the scene to look up into Gansey’s face, he’s wearing a smile that’s bizarrely proud and fond and he squeezes her hand, which she’s left in his without noticing.

When her mother calls later, scolding her for closing the store early, Blue smiles through her reprimand and Gansey’s hand, which hasn’t left hers since the hospital room, squeezes hers. He strokes his thumb over the joint of her own and when Blue finally hangs up, she can only watch him scrub his hand through his hair once before she reaches up greedily for his face and she takes, she takes when she kisses him and he gives when he kisses her back and they kiss and kiss for a very long time.

Gansey drops her off that night and she gives him her number at the door, and when he calls her that weekend, nothing bad has happened to him because her lips touched his.

 

*

 

In another universe she meets him at Nino’s when he goes there alone with only his book for company. She sneers at his Aglionby sweater and he raises his eyebrows at her indolent face, and she stumbles for a moment wondering why a raven boy would have a pen mark across his lip and chin when they were supposed to be perfect, faultless bastards.

She sits with him during her break and he shows her his journal because she leans forward eagerly when he talks about Glendower, and she laughs when he smiles and shivers when he brushes her hand, and she thinks then that she might be doomed.

“So you believe in all these legends?” she asks and his eyes are wide when he says, “Don’t you?”

Blue never wants to leave this table so she tells him how all her family are psychics and how she’s walked along the corpse road and how her best friend is, himself, a ghost.

Gansey looks intrigued and curious and excited instead of dismissive and disbelieving, so he stays until Blue clocks out and loads her bike into the back of his car, and he drives her home because Noah is always waiting for her when she gets off of her work shifts.

Gansey loves Noah, and Noah, for once, doesn’t fade while Gansey pesters him with question after question after question—some curious, some theological, some ley line-related. Noah flickers sometimes and Blue reaches for his hand, and she grips him tight and sure and Noah stays corporeal the entire time that the three of them drive to a diner downtown and sip milkshakes and slowly but surely become friends.

Later Gansey drops her off and Noah waits by the door while he leans down like he’s going to kiss her, and Blue says, “I can’t,” and Gansey presses his lips to her cheek instead. His smile is blinding and they become a couple of cheek kisses and he promises that he’ll wait forever if that’s what it takes to learn the shape of her lips.

 

*

 

In another universe she’s driving with her ex-boyfriend-turned-best-friend Adam when they pull up to a red light at the exact same time as the BMW in the next lane. Adam glances out the window and freezes, so Blue looks out too, but before she can fix her gaze on anyone specific the BMW revs its engine and Adam says, “Blue, grab the dash,” and against all reason they peel off down the road when the light turns green.

“This is senseless!” Blue cries over the wind rushing through the car. Adam’s car is old and rickety and he bought it for $800 in a backalley deal that Blue’s never doubted was illegal, and he loses spectacularly to the immaculate BMW.

The other car pulls up to a hard stop at the next light. Adam rolls up slower and Blue leans across him to shout out the window before he can say a word, about how reckless and ridiculous they are, about how unreasonably dangerous they are, and she barely flicks her eyes over the stately clean boy in the passenger seat, too focused on glaring at the dark, razor-edged boy behind the wheel.

When she’s done, Adam says, “You fucked up my engine; buy us a beer and we won’t complain,” and the driver boy smiles all sharp and pulls into the next parking lot.

They crowd around the same table and Adam doesn’t take his eyes off the reckless boy with the tattoo on his neck and Blue finally looks at the stately boy from the passenger seat.

“I think he’s an idiot,” Gansey says, “completely incorrigible.”

It’s the first time Blue laughs at that bar.

Later, Ronan insists that he’s going to take Adam on a drive in a car that can do real damage, and Gansey buys her dinner, and shocks thrill up her spine when their legs tangle beneath the table or when his hand brushes hers by their water glasses.

Adam comes back looking windswept around nine to take her home, and before they go he presses Ronan hard against his car and Blue looks away from them to gaze up at Gansey instead.

“Can I kiss you?” he asks, and Blue pulls her lip between her teeth and nods.

His kiss is like electric sparks and green lights and the screech of tires on asphalt. Blue holds him tightly against her when she drags him down and she never, ever wants to let him go.

 

*

 

In another universe they’re friends since kindergarten, when she’s playing psychic with normal decks of cards and pretending to read palms or look through crystal balls that are really just glass decorations. He lays on the grass beside her and makes up story after story after story about sleeping kings and magical girls, and they keep her giggling while she pretends, time and time again, to read his fortune.

In elementary school he reads up on King Arthur for every book report and she checks out every novel in the library to do hers on the Salem Witch Trials, and when the teachers tell them that they can’t do the same concept yet again they stay up all night under the same blanket and teach each other every single bit of information they know about their favorite subjects. Gansey does his report on the Witch Trials and Blue does hers on Arthurian legend and when the teachers look down their noses, they find seats in the back of the room and giggle all through next class about their supposed cunning.

In middle school Gansey discovers Glendower one day, on an odd segment on the History Channel when he’s laid up in the hospital over a wasp sting. Blue, sitting beside his bed with her feet propped up, flips through a magazine the entire time and barely pays attention. Gansey beseeches his mother to bring him his laptop, and he spends the rest of his hospital stay immersed in legend. Blue, less interested in the subject after Gansey tries to tell her the tale for the fifteenth time, draws patterns on his legs and pretends she’s making constellations that will lift up into the sky.

In high school the Sargent family business loses a lot of money when a newspaper article goes up defaming their work and debunking a lot of their so-called psychic abilities. Blue, who already knows how her family does their tricks, doesn’t read the article. She brings lunch every day for two years because she can’t afford to buy it, and after awhile Gansey stops offering to pay for hers. Instead he offers her bananas and bites of salad and sometimes an entire sandwich that he claims his mother accidentally packed as extra. She smiles slyly at his sideways glances and offers him bites of her yogurt in return and Gansey thinks nonstop about how his mouth has been on the spoon that hers has, on the fork that hers has, and he stays up most nights thinking about how many times they’ve practically kissed and he wonders when he started caring. One day he buys a milkshake from the school bake sale and Blue takes sips without asking and he thinks, _this is how it should be_ and she says, “We couldn’t be any more fifties couple if we tried,” and when she kisses him in the middle of the cafeteria he thinks that he was wrong, he was wrong, because _this_ is the only way it was ever meant to be.

 

*

 

In another universe she’s best friends with Ronan and they’re in the middle of a literal, actual wrestling match when he shoves her off his stomach and scrambles to his feet just as two boys come strolling through the grass towards them.

Ronan throws his arm around the fair one’s shoulders and finally, _finally_ introduces her to his boyfriend after a month of hearing about him, how his hands are so fine and boyish if only he’d use some lotion like a normal person; how his smile is somehow both bashful and free; how Ronan thinks he might, _might_ , be in love with him. Adam’s pretty but Blue likes the friend he’s brought along with him and when Adam says, “This is my brother, Gansey,” Blue wants to wipe his presidential smile off his face with her lips.

Gansey’s kind of an asshole but so is Ronan, and Blue already loves him. So she sits through lunch with all of them, squeezed into a booth beside her best friend who’s staring unabashedly across the table at Adam the entire time. Gansey watches her with a small, private smile while Adam tells her about how he and Ronan met, and Blue’s listening and nodding and asking questions but she can’t stop herself from sneaking glances at Gansey all through Adam’s tale. Her heart flutters every time she meets his eyes.

They part ways after lunch and Ronan pulls her into his car and demands, in that silent way of his, to know what she thinks—meaning he puts his foot down hard on the gas pedal and plays deafening music and tells her that she looks like an idiot with clips in her hair until she turns down the stereo dial and says, “Relax, asshole. I liked him.”

Ronan’s silent for half a second before calls her a bitch for changing the station. She tips her head back and laughs, loose and happy, and flattens her palm out the passenger window so that the wind can skim through her fingers while they drive. Ronan decelerates to fifty and leaves the radio on Blue’s pop rock station. She knows he knows all the words, and pokes him repeatedly while she belts the lyrics even though he never sings along.

Some days Adam stays over and other times Gansey rolls up in his fancy car to collect his brother. They elbow and jibe each other down the front walk and Blue looks determinedly out another window and pretends she doesn’t want to know him past their five-minute conversations at the door while they wait for Adam to come down, no way.

One day Gansey knocks on the door and Blue says, “Oh, I thought Adam was sleeping here tonight. One sec, I’ll go get him—” and Gansey catches her arm and when she turns around, his eyes are soft.

And he tells her, “I came to see you.”

Her stomach flips and she brushes hair from her eyes and they sit in the living room and talk for a very long time. Then Gansey offers to take her for a drive and one drive turns into many drives turns into regular meet-ups so they can tool around town or, sometimes, so he can teach her how to drive stick out on the interstate.

One day he stops her and she thinks he’s going to say, it’s late, they should get home, the stars are already shining. Instead he pulls her out to sit on the roof of his car and gaze up at the constellations, and when he says, “Could I beg just one kiss? Under all this?” she grabs the hand he’s waving at the sky and whispers, “Yes.”

 

*

 

In another universe she’s a grad student trying to collect information for a psych paper she has due and Gansey’s a boy who works in the library. He stays up with her every night once they’re the only people there. He brings books to her while she types and looks up information in the index when she asks and sometimes brings her late-night coffees if she’s falling asleep at her laptop.

Sometimes she asks him to tell her stories while she works but she gets caught up in his own personal research project, which his parents stopped funding altogether. He says they pay for his apartment but he’s a librarian to fund his research trips, to coastal European towns and South American treks and southern Africa and everywhere else. He tells stories that sound more like fantasy and more times than not Blue finds herself abandoning her research paper completely to sit enthralled across from him at the table, her fingers tracing the rim of her coffee cup and her eyes on him.

One night she says, “How long have you been looking?” because it’s two in the morning and she doesn’t want him to stop talking, possibly ever.

He scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck and she tells herself three times to stop thinking of it as _adorable_ or _endearing_.

“Nearly ten years, now,” he tells her finally. He knocks her one of his perfectly charming, wretchedly dazzling smiles and adds, “You should come with me one day.”

Blue looks down and tells him that she’s got too many papers due to go with him, and after all, that sounds awfully like running away and she barely knows him and she wants too many things for her future to run away with some boy she barely knows.

“Then get to know me,” he says after, like it’s all that simple. She stares at him in wide-eyed wonder at this boy who sees everything as so conceivable, so easy, so _possible_ even when it’s not.

The next night he writes his number on her coffee cup and leaves before she can even look down.

She calls him on Saturday. They kiss Saturday night, against the passenger door of his car. She wears a yellow skirt, he wears a yellow polo. His lips taste like coffee and their dinner and magic.

 

*

 

In another universe she’s six and he’s seven and he’s playing in his backyard when she peeks over the fence of a beautiful, ornate house she’s been riding her bike past for four months without ever seeing the yard. She clamors over the fence to get a better look at the fountain that peeks over the gate and stumbles on Gansey, young and laughing and beautiful. He invites her to play and they spend all day in his yard, fake swordfighting and pretending to climb mountains and playacting knights fighting dragons.

His mother calls them in around one and Gansey says, “This is my friend, Blue,” as though they’ve known each other always and like her visit was premeditated, and his mother only looks confused for a second before her face softens in a smile and she invites Blue inside for lemonade and finger sandwiches. Blue drinks her weight in lemonade and eats four finger sandwiches because she’s never seen such tiny, sensible, and fanciful things and when they go back outside after lunch she lays in the grass and moans that she’s never moving again.

Gansey tells her she’s a funny creature and goes back to wielding his stick like a sword, dancing around her prone form and making exaggerated swooshing noises while Blue laughs and laughs. She pretends to be a regal queen and Gansey her loyal knight trying to win her favor, and he battles awful monsters and potential suitors and evil stepmothers just for her.

“Sir Gansey,” she proclaims dramatically, her hand across her forehead and her body still draped across the lawn, “to win my favor you must do one last task.”

He tells her he’ll fetch the ingredients for the spell she makes up and Blue lays in the grass while Gansey heads for the woods. When she hears him cry out a few minutes later, she goes to him and then goes for his mom and the entire time he’s panting, “I’m allergic to wasps,” and clutching his arm, and she sits beside him in the ambulance and says, “Don’t die, don’t die, you don’t die yet, _you don’t die yet_.”

Blue sits with him for days and Gansey lives after all and when he asks her, later, if she wants to be his girlfriend, Blue’s giddy and blushing and she says yes three times before she catches herself.

They don’t kiss for four years, when he’s less of a childhood boyfriend and more of a childhood love, and when they do, a million butterflies take flight in her stomach.

“She saved my life,” Gansey later tells everyone who asks how they met, and in this universe, in this life, that’s the entire truth.

 

*

 

In another universe Blue is best friends with Noah and she’s still tied into the prophecies and the ley lines and the curses.

She holds his hand while they walk to meet Whelk by the churchyard and hides in the trees while he does his ritual and when Whelk tries to sneak up behind him, Noah’s skateboard raised high above his head, Blue leaps out and tackles him to the ground instead. She can hear Noah screaming while she wrestles with Whelk in the dirt and dust and mud, and she has scratches up her arms and blood on her shirt by the time Whelk smashes a rock into her cheek.

She floats in and out of consciousness while Noah shoves Whelk off of her and scoops her up in his arms and flips his skateboard back onto its wheels so that he can ride with her all the way to the hospital.

He admits her in time and won’t let go of her hand until the doctors drag him bodily from the room, and while the doctors check her vitals and hook her up to machine after machine after machine, her head lolls to the side and she sees a quiet, watchful boy gazing at her the whole time. She falls asleep and he’s still there when she comes to. The doctors are all gone, the room empty but for the two of them and the empty beds along the other wall.

“What’s your name?” she asks, and he tells her Gansey, and how he was helping his mother set up a campaign dinner party when he was stung by a wasp and rushed to the hospital.

Blue gets halfway through a heated rant against his mother’s political views when he cuts her off, laughing, and assures her that he doesn’t agree with her either. Blue decides she likes him after that and talks with him all through the night, even when Noah comes in to spend the last two hours of visiting times with her. He holds her hand quietly in his the entire time before leaving with a promise to come back tomorrow.

Gansey says, “Your boyfriend?” and Blue says, “If one of us were dead, maybe. Noah might as well be my brother.”

Gansey’s entire face lights up and Blue pretends not to notice and they talk and talk and talk about curses and spells and sleeping kings until the sun comes up gold and bathes them and the room in opalescent light. She falls asleep watching how the rising sun casts beautiful rays across his face that turns him bright and golden and magnificent.

He’s gone when she wakes except for a scrap of paper with a number on it beside her bed, and Blue crushes it in her pocket until she’s free of the hospital too.

Noah walks her hand in hand to her first date with him that weekend, and when she and Gansey hug goodbye later that night, she wraps her arms tightly around his neck and he brushes his hands, soft and sure, across the scar on her cheek where the doctors say her bones may never mend perfectly back together.

She has a smudgy cheek and Gansey never kisses her but they hold hands and drive late at night and Blue thinks, _This is enough, this is enough_.

 

*

 

In another universe everything’s the same except Blue tells him that he’s going die and Gansey brushes a hand across her cheek, where tears had begun to fall without her notice or permission. She shakes her head and he pulls her to his chest and promises that he’s never, ever going to kiss her, and never going to leave her either.

“You don’t have a choice,” she hiccups against his shirt, and tries to get herself under control. “It’s been…fated.”

He tells her that he’s never believed in fate quite as strongly as he believes in her.

They drive and hold hands and stargaze, and he calls her Jane and she calls him a bastard, and when it rains and he cups her face and whispers, “Kiss me,” she shakes her head and starts to cry all over again.

“You _promised_ ,” she says, and he sighs and releases her.

He sounds rueful when he runs his hand through his hair and says, “I forgot how stubborn you can be,” and she sets her jaw and snaps, “More stubborn than fate itself.”

Blue doesn’t kiss him and Gansey doesn’t die, and when it’s all over he presses thankful kisses across her cheeks and nose and eyelids. He whispers, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Her skin heats where his lips touched and she closes her eyes against his affection. This, she thinks, is the proper way of things.

 

*

 

In another universe—well. This is the only universe where they kiss and the wrong kind of magic flies.

**Author's Note:**

> [hmuu](http://badlandd.tumblr.com/)


End file.
